If you missed it last night, 60 Minutes had a fantastic report on artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s changing the world. Charlie Rose offers an in-depth look at how AI has made more progress in the past five years than in the previous 50. And how it’s being used for more than simply beating humans at “Jeopardy!”
Rose first explores how IBM Watson is revolutionizing cancer treatment. For example, scientific research grows at a rate of some 8,000 academic papers a day, a number far too much for doctors to keep up with. In an analysis of more than 1,000 cancer patients, Watson found the same treatments available that doctors had recommended 99 percent of the time.
Watson can read 25 million published medical papers in about week, able to suggest new trials human doctors may be unaware of.
“The – more exciting part about [the analysis] is in 30 percent of patients, Watson found something new – so that’s 300-plus people where Watson identified a treatment that a well-meaning, hard-working group of physicians hadn’t found,” says Dr. Sharpless, head of the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The treatments identified by Watson were in clinical trial or had only become approved or revealed recently. “These were real – things – we would have considered actionable had we known about it at the time of the diagnosis.”
Watch the 60 Minutes report on AI below:
Rose also interviewed Sophia, the same life-like robot from Hanson Robotics that once said she’d “destroy all humans.” Besides the exposed portion of her head that exposes all her inner electronics, Sophia might be the most advanced human-like robot we’ve ever seen.
Her conversation with Rose, however, was nonsensical at times, showing that there’s still a long way to go with human-like robots. She made several contradictory statements and even failed to answer Rose at all following one of his questions.
Sophia managed to crack some jokes and discuss everything from emotions to souls during her interview. Her creator, David Hanson, sat by her side throughout the interview, looking over at her like a proud parent. Hanson, who has created about 20 robots at his company, hopes to use robots to help socially-isolated people, like the elderly, with everyday tasks.
Here’s Sophia’s interview with Rose on 60 Minutes:
Finally, on 60 Minutes Overtime, Rose explores the labs at Carnegie Mellon on the cutting edge of AI. See robots learning to go where humans can’t.
